The Cold Man & The Sea

When you first decided to really do this thing, you didn't envision...snow. Or whatever is falling from the sky now: half liquid and half ice, these tiny hurtling Cadillacs stinging your cheek. Bone-chilling mid-December in Maine, a white haze hangs over the stony points of land in the distance. The murk has bits of red and purple in it, little bulbs of color strung over the ocean. A nor'easter has stirred up the Atlantic like a supershake, driving a frenzy of waves. They come one after another, aging before your eyes, black swells that turn green as they rise, then hunch and go white-haired as they fall apart.

This is an important moment for you. You're about to surf. You meant to do this long ago, but what happened? You grew up on the slack waves of Long Island Sound? And then, what? Life took over until the essential things you had on your to-do list, the golden for-you things, seemed like maybe they would just stay on that list forever. In the last three years, since the birth of your first child, and then a second, you've come to understand this truth: You're 38 years old and soon to be older—and your world is held together as tenuously as an icicle on the gutter. Everything is fraught with new breakability. And now you lie awake nights hoping things won't break.

Zipped into your wet suit, you haul your board down the stone embankment, out across the empty beach, to the eddies at the edge of the ocean. It's a very cold wind, isn't it? Made of oxygen that's been blowing around the world for eons. And the water is thirty-nine degrees of ball-grabbing insistence. Water is 3 billion years old, and it bashes and sucks and sings: Come to me, lover, searcher, surf dude, it's time to teach you something about Ma Nature.

Today your fellow conspirator is Brother-in-Law, five years younger than you, single and wearing an enigmatic swami-grin. He's wading into frigid waters with an old waterlogged board he bought secondhand. "Fucking cold, fucking cold, FUCKING COLD!!" he repeats like a mantra. He doesn't yet share all your feelings of too little time. He recently summited Denali, round-trip in twelve days, damn fast, according to the bush pilot who flew him down from base camp. Even pitted against the crevasses of a glacial mountain, he beats time.

He's also a man who makes a certain sartorial statement. He has taken some thermal insulation from a sleeping bag and duct-taped it to his broken rib (another story entirely, involving bourbon, an icy slope, a couple of kayaks and an impromptu slalom course), then put on a wet suit, a windshirt, a dry shirt on top of that and a billed hat. Your brother-in-law is a walking Polyprene tag sale, a patchwork Popeye. He looks like the opposite of those surf gods in neon colors, the yellow-lime-electric-orange human beings doing the unthinkable in the pages of that surfing magazine you sometimes read. Page after page, they stand inside the curls of twenty-footers with narcotic half smiles, on surfboards bearing the names Evolution, G-Force and Reef, lost in Fiji, Tavarua, Indonesia, California, Hawaii. Out in all that liquid space. Free.

Maine is not known for its monster breaks, or anything related to this fine sport, and so does not appear in surfer magazines. But there are waves here, fifteen minutes from your door, and today they're topping out at six or seven feet. Not bad, especially if you don't know how to surf. And, dude, remember: You don't know how to surf. You're a novitiate, discombobulated driftwood in a December storm.

By the time you've struggled past the wave breaks and reached the outside, you've drunk enough salt water to fill a lagoon and you're a little cross-eyed. Brother-in-Law has made it, too, resting facedown on his board for a second, catching his breath in the calm fetch. But this is a nor'easter. New swells propagate, radiate and rush in black, rippling procession, and suddenly you're caught by some miracle in the clutch of a wave that is unfurling beneath you. You've never ridden a bucking bronc, but this could be similar. And no sooner are you up on your feet than you are unceremoniously pitched headfirst, flipped like a coin as the wave explodes into a million glittering coins.

This is the part where frigid, thousand-volt water is forced into your nose, mouth, ears. A full-body, nonoptional enema. When you finally break free of the rinse cycle and come to the surface again, Brother-in-Law appears on the rising horizon, locked belly-down on his board with that enigmatic swami-grin and duckbill hat, missiling at eight knots right for your head.

On the ride home in your oversize family vehicle with two child seats and Fig Newtons smushed in the belt buckles, you both shiver and moan, to communicate that you're still alive. A bruise blossoms on your sternum from the point of contact with Brother-in-Law's board. Finally, after what seems like a long time, words form again.

"Man," says Brother-in-Law.

"Goddang," say you.

"Can you imagine surfing in warm water? There are people right now surfing in warm water..."

"Who get up every day..."

"On, like, the North Shore, dude."

A stop sign, and the wiper wicks snow from the window. You both look left, then right. You both are very, very blue, like ice in certain light.

The North Shore. The words clang through the freezer of your brain, conjure palm trees and Hawaiian surf, brown skin and the taste of frangipani and salt. Perhaps you're about thirty years late to this sport, bound to an entirely different life, on a rocky shoreline 6,000 miles from that sandy one.

But still. Brother-in-Law finishes the thought and unwittingly plants the seed. Lost in the same daydream, he says, "What do you think the real thing feels like anyway? I really wonder what it feels like to surf the real thing."

It gets bad, this dream, so bad that on any given day, after you've picked up the scattered toys and train sets, ferreted out cookie crumbs from under the table and folded the tiny shirts and pants of your offspring, after surrendering to the fact that you and your wife may never complete a conversation again and are often incoherent once the kids have dozed off for the first, fleeting sleep of a five-stage night, you thumb through your surfing magazines, feeling a deep-down, visceral ache. You become lost in the nearly pornographic ecstasy of this otherworld, the incredible waves, the rocketing surfers, the narcotic smiles. Really: What must it feel like?

And then one day you wake up, in hopes of forgetting. Forget the terrorist fears and market ululations. Forget the world as you know it. You pack the family and leave behind the broken lamp, the unpaid bills and the ringing phone. You flee the cold weather. And with one genie blink, here you are: with your summer babe and two heartbreaking trolls, one who is nearly 3, and the other who is three months old. You're here to surf, but there's something else, too, something you never realized about parenthood, back when it was all just the ambiguous meeting of sperm and egg: It can be as lonely as polar exploration, and in moments mightily Sisyphean. But when you're together like this, in the bubble, you're given a gift. Sure, there are diapers and meltdowns, but there's also the sweetness of this every-hour dialogue with your wife and kids, this connectedness that gets lost in weeks of white noise and work.

So you go to Hawaii, to Oahu, starting at Waikiki, that surreal city on the beach where people pad the sidewalks barefoot and nearly naked, surfboards balanced on heads, past Louis Vuitton and Chanel boutiques. Here you stay at the Halekulani Hotel, with soft robes in the closet and surfing lessons available nearby. From your lanai that first day, the kids napping on freshly laundered sheets, you gaze down the beach to Diamond Head and the jagged-edged Ko'olaus, watch the sky burble in a lava wash of orange and red at sunset, breathe in jasmine and a light salt breeze. Across that broad expanse of sea, waves emanate from the Southern Hemisphere, legendary slow rollers for beginners like you, delicious-looking things on which a phalanx of surfers rises and falls until the light sifts out of the sky and there is nothing left but the breathing sound of the ocean, struck once across the face by silver moonlight.

The next morning, you go looking for a lesson and, on the advice of a friend, try Clyde Aikau, brother to one of Hawaii's most famous big-wave surfers, Eddie Aikau, who was lost at sea twenty-five years ago. Clyde is 53 years old, a hulk of a man, who runs a beach concession in the tradition of the beach boys of yore, the ukulele-strumming, fun-loving originals, including surfing's greatest ambassador, Duke Kahanamoku, who clowned and gave surf lessons and took people on outrigger canoes for beer money. Legend has it that the Duke, as he's called, rode the longest wave ever, here at Waikiki, an impossible mile and a half.

At first Clyde's standoffish. He seems to glower behind black Terminator glasses. Truth be told, he kind of brings you down. But then he speaks his brother's name and his mood revolves once, his sun re-rises and throws gold over everything. "When you go into the ocean," he says, "you're going back hundreds of years, to the purest time, the purest element. I can remember the look on my brother's face, dropping in on a forty-foot wave at Waimea—forty-foot, brah!—and there was nowhere he'd rather have been."

Clyde opens the door on Eddie, his lost brother, his greatest hero, and tells you how Eddie was the very first North Shore lifeguard, saving scores of lives, how he vanished when he joined a boat that was sailing to Tahiti to trace the route of the original settlers, how there was bad weather that day, but the governor and the mayor had come for the send-off so they decided to go anyway. He tells how the boat was swamped and Eddie decided to swim for help. Later a rescue plane discovered the beleaguered party. What ensued was a massive three-week search for Eddie Aikau—planes, helicopters, boats, even psychics, one who claimed the surfer had been swallowed whole by a whale on the eastern side of the island.

"It was very hard," says Clyde. "Still is." The beach is mobbed, but talking to Clyde you feel that you've entered a hushed room where there's only you and he—and his brother, in neon. Then he tells you one more story. In his brother's name, Clyde began the annual Eddie Aikau Big Wave Invitational, an event vaguely scheduled between December and March, on the North Shore, for a day when the forecast promises gargantuan waves. At that first contest, in 1986, Clyde says that when he paddled out to the lineup, to where about twenty guys were waiting on sets of waves, he saw a flash in the water nearby, a sea turtle, and then followed it, beyond where everyone was sitting on their boards, beyond where it seemed to make sense. And no sooner had he lost sight of the turtle than a twenty-five-foot wave appeared before him; he paddled, dropped in and had the ride of the day, winning the contest.

"Oh yeah, the turtle is part of Eddie," Clyde says now, taking off his Terminator glasses, rubbing his eyes and squinting at the memory. "He watched over me that day and told me to follow him. Our family can trace our lineage back to Heva Heva, my great-grandfather who was a high priest and a caretaker of Waimea Bay. From Heva to Eddie to me, it's all right there in that patch of water."

He motions for you to follow him, so you do. He picks up a board. It doesn't matter if it's a one-foot wave or a monster wave, he says, surfing is the best feeling in the world. He drops the board in the sand and shows you: When you've paddled into a wave—and caught it—grab the board at its edges and push off, bringing your feet to a firm plant with arms stretched wide. "Then hold on, brah," he says. "And when you turn, torque your body. Like this." Clyde torques his body, scooching the board over the sand, left then right. The tops of his feet are the caramel color of many decades spent beneath this same sun, doing this same wondrous thing.

Out in the water, Clyde is a drillmaster. He takes long, strong strokes as he skims past the Japanese tourists clinging to boards. In surfing, your first realization is that it's damn hard to paddle long distances, especially when you're on a board above the water. Head craned forward, back arched, arms stroking, it requires muscles you've never used before. But Clyde effortlessly hydroplanes. When a set of waves arrives, you hear nothing but screaming from him. "Paddle, paddle, paddle! Move it, move it, move it! Go, man, go!" His tone makes you think of the army. "Hey, brah," he barks, "if you want that wave, you better get your ass in it."

You catch a few, pop to your feet in ready position, arms outstretched. As advertised, the waves are perfect for learning, and your wipeouts are benevolent, fun, enema-free. The water is warm and green; the air warm and blue: There really is no difference in temperature between the two. The hours are measured in each new surge of waves, each new ride and wipeout, and then the long paddle back out against the incessant beating of a new set, and the waiting, just sitting among other surfers waiting for another chance. And this cycle repeats for as long as a body holds up—until your fingers prune, muscles ache and head begins to thrum, until you find one last wave to the shore, to your room and the kids just in from the beach, sandy and smelling of suntan lotion—and then the sea continues on, anyway, without you.

This, then, is what surfing is: Sun, salt, heat and exhaustion. All-body ertion followed by dreamlike fatigue that blurs the harder outlines of reality and allows you to lie down and sleep happily in a new place, at whatever hour of the day, no matter who's not sleeping. Surfing is oneness and nothingness, or the somethingness that occurs when you're overwhelmed by a 3-billion-year force larger than yourself.

And more. Put this on a hula-dancer postcard and send it to Brother-in-Law, because after Clyde and another four days splashing around at Waikiki trying to get your sea legs, you've figured it out: Surfing is the destruction of earthly vanities—of ambition, envy, pride—because the ocean doesn't know what these things are. Afloat, at sea, you find yourself two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, wave and white water, fin and tail. You're the purest element, not human anymore, not even a metaphor for human. You just are. And you're set free by the immensity of everything you aren't. On top of a wave, underneath a wave, dragged by the riptide, you're free in one other way, too: Free to never return, if that were your inclination, which makes you more free when you do.

Behold this Holy Grail, these seven fabled miles of surfing, the North Shore: Here the names of the breaks alone illumine an entire atomic history of the sport: the Banzai Pipeline, Sunset, Waimea Bay, Log Cabins, Rocky Point, Chun's Reef, Kammieland, Monster Mush. What was once a '70s hippie outpost is now ground zero, a potpourri of pros, locals and tourists, trawling through the village of Haleiwa for coffee, sandwiches and shave ice on their way up the highway to the beaches. To sun and fun, magic tricks and epic wipeouts, enlightenment and oblivion.

Your timing is perfect. You and the elfin posse have arrived on the eve of the season's first swell. After four months of flat ocean, of shaping boards and watching surf videos, the real thing. But remember: It's not you who's been waiting four months—the locals have. However swept up you've become, you're still a haole to them, an outsider, a mainlander, a hopeless Caucasian case, translated literally as someone "without breath." You're a father and a husband and a worker bee on a rocky, freezing-ass coastline 6,000 miles from here. Parenthood is the vast new chaos of your life, the Big Bang occurring under your own roof, the monster wave you ride—fantastical, impossible and scary.

So it's true: You'll probably never be one of those neon men in the surf magazines. And yet you now know how to stand up and surf a little. You know to watch the late local news in Hawaii to get the surf report at 10:20 p.m. And you're dumb, in the best way. Which is why you're about to do this thing anyway.

The swell hits in the late afternoon, a truly mesmerizing, planetary event. The sky sheds its high blue for a low-ceiling turquoise green. A light wind picks up, riffles the palm fronds until they clatter. The waves begin small and build, hour by hour, foot by foot, so that by five they're coming in at seven or eight feet. Anxious surf squirrels load their boards on car racks, drift forth from bushes and bungalows, walking the width of the beach in a trance, gaping at the flash, buck and rush of the ocean.

"Man, people are really horny for waves around here," says a former pro surfer named Randy Rarick. His house is fifty yards from Sunset Beach, and he's old-school laid-back, full of so much surfer gemütlichkeit he gives you a loaner board he shaped himself and points you to a place where you may not get killed. You and board and family drive down the highway to Chun's Reef, about 1,000 percent sure there's never been a surfer song written about a novice haole taking the North Shore by storm in a Dodge Caravan.

Even at this hour, dinnertime, cars are still lining up and down the highway. People hurriedly unload their boards, looking serious, hop down a stone wall to the beach, strap their leashes to their legs, walk their boards into the shallows, jump on and begin to paddle, moving water with cupped hands, propelling their bodies toward the horizon line, finally letting go of land, smiling.

And just behind them, so do you.

Once out to the lineup, you linger. Below are fish and deep clefts of tropical water; above, fish-shaped clouds and sky. These particular waves have been whipped up and driven south across the Pacific by a storm front sweeping from Siberia to Alaska, waves cruising unhindered over a 1,500-mile fetch until they crash into the reefs of Hawaii, where they go from being deepwater to shallow-water waves, driven up by rock and coral, energy piling skyward, then, bowed by gravity, cupping, unbuckling and crashing downward.

Eight feet doesn't sound as big as it looks from where you're sitting, but it's pretty damn sizable. It looks like a reckoning. But it costs nothing to try. So you do. You size a wave on the horizon, pick it as yours, take a deep breath, heart thumping, and as it speeds forth, you paddle like hell, trying to steal a glance behind at the approaching wall of water. Then everything begins to rise, as if some big hand is scooping up this patch of ocean with you happening in it. From here it's pure instinct: You stand on your feet, in a wave that almost instantaneously swats you from behind. The next sensation is of toppling headlong into the drink, of tumbling and tumbling and tumbling. Your board with its razorlike skeg guillotines down just past the tip of your nose. And you can feel the leash break loose at your ankle. And then you're pinned and pummeled by about 6,000 pounds of water, body going rag doll in the tumult, revolving, cartwheeling.

Every wipeout is its own little heart stop, its own near-death. It's a moment where control of your life has been relinquished to a higher being that is beating the pudding out of you. But every once in a while, a little annihilation feels good; sprites appear before you with messages from beyond. "When big waves hit you," says Clyde, "what pulls you out is heart and spirit. Physically, you can only go so far; mentally, you can go a lot farther."

In your case, you're back to the surface, sputtering. Through glassy eyes, you see land-sky-wave, and then you're swamped again before you've taken a good breath, swallowing, being force-fed what feels like an entire block of salt. Six thousand more pounds on your chest squeezes what's left of your oxygen—so this is what's meant by haole—and now you're less enthralled by your own annihilation, more panicky, fighting for the surface. And, make no mistake, it is a fight at whose dark, gauzy heart is the nauseating realization that this would be a very bad ending to the safari dream.

Then all at once, you're bobbing on the surface again. "Goddang," yell you at the sky, lungs greedily grabbing air. "Jesus Mary."

The ocean, benevolent mother that she is, has pushed you past the wave breaks, and after regaining oxygen and equilibrium, you're left with only the ignominy of having to swim after your board, which literally gets pushed an eighth of a mile to the beach, the same beach on which your family has come to frolic. Once ashore, you can see them between watery drips, maybe two hundred yards down: Your son running in circles around your wife, who holds the baby, all of them glowing there. Perhaps the way the light falls on them now, the absolute tangerine of the moment, is a message from the gods to call it a day, to go back to that other life. But your summer babe gives you a sexy wave that communicates an understanding: Go ahead, there's still time. After a quick surgical fix of the leash, you paddle back out, and now, having spotted your wave, having maniacally stroked and caught it perfectly at its highest cusping point, you grasp the board on either side. You plant your feet and open your arms wide, just as Clyde taught you. And you hold on, the wave lifting and racing, with you on top.

What does it feel like?

It feels like flying. That's the only thing you can think of: Flying. Unhindered, unfettered, unbound from yourself, you're surrounded by blue air and blue water. You have your arms wide, and you're being driven by the ocean, which sounds like dynamite going off around you. And then you're lifting off. When you torque the board, it gives easily, and you're making turns. When you walk up on the board and then back, you speed and slow. You bend and reach for the board between your legs, grab hold with your right hand, lie back into the wave and zag left, carving a sharp line in the ocean. You're not neon, but in this one second, there are sparks of color flying off. Of trillions given by this ocean, it's one of the most amazing feelings.

Eventually, the wave crumbles, and you turn back out, sun sliding into the infinite fetch of water before you, everyone lost in this last shimmer before darkness, the shore all but invisible now. You paddle hard and fast, figuring you've got maybe a half hour, and you want more. When you make the lineup, though, there are no waves in sight. In the long lull between sets, you sit with about twenty other hard-breathing, water-beaded bodies. Tomorrow you may find yourself in the belly of a whale; you may come back as a turtle. Who knows? But now you can hear the sound of air moving over water and feel the soft swells. Everyone sits silently, just taking it in, grinning.

This part is easy, for your new life with children, however fantastical, has required patience you never knew you had, and then some you don't have yet. You're trying, learning, tumbling. If you were to compose a few lines on these sheaves of water to a younger man, they would be this: Surfing is the future rushing at you, and you paddling, wide-eyed and awed, to catch it. Surfing is patience, and patience is the ocean, wherever that ocean is, even if it's freezing-ass Maine...especially if it's freezing-ass Maine.

For one moment, though, this is not Maine. And for one moment, you're connected to everything by warm water and light, the timelessness of floating in liquid space.

Actually, brah, I could be wrong, but I think I saw you out there, too; in fact, I know you well, you and I, me and you, yeah, even now, we're still sitting out there, waiting.

Michael Paterniti is a GQ writer-at-large. He is the author of Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain.

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